Information signals such as a tracking servo signal, an address information signal and a recovered clock signal are recorded on a magnetic transfer carrier. There has been known a magnetic transfer apparatus magnetically transferring information signals recorded on a magnetic transfer carrier onto a magnetic record medium such as a hard disk or a floppy disk. For example, a magnetic transfer carrier disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 10-40544 (1998) has magnetic portions made of ferromagnetic material in a pattern for information signals on a surface of a substrate. A magnetic record medium is a sheet or a disk with a ferromagnetic thin film or a ferromagnetic powder coat layer formed thereon. A surface of a magnetic transfer carrier is put into contact with a surface of a magnetic record medium in the shape of a disk and a prescribed magnetic field is applied. With this procedure, information signals formed on the magnetic transfer carrier are magnetically transferred onto the magnetic record medium. It is important that information signals with a high density are uniformly transferred stably across all of the surface of the magnetic record medium in order to reproduce records with high precision with a magnetic head of a magnetic record reproducing apparatus. On this occasion in magnetic transfer, if tiny foreign matter exists on the surface of the magnetic transfer carrier, when both are put into contact with each other for magnetic transfer, a depression arises on the surface of the magnetic record medium by the tiny foreign matter, some times with a resultant tiny protrusion around the depression. When data record is reproduced using the magnetic head, such a tiny protrusion on the magnetic record medium is put into contact with a magnetic head with the result that the magnetic head is thrown away, for example, at the instant of the contact, which causes record reproduction performance of the magnetic head to be reduced or a life time thereof to be shorter due to physical contact thereof with the hard disk, further tending to destruction of the hard disk itself by chance. Therefore, it is very important to clean a magnetic transfer carrier prior to magnetic transfer so as to remove the above described foreign matter by the cleaning, for which there has been conventionally proposed a cleaning method cleaning a surface of a magnetic transfer carrier with a cleaning tool.
In a case of such a cleaning method, a corner of a magnetic film on a surface of a magnetic transfer carrier is scraped away in cleaning with a cleaning tool and the scraped magnetic film is in some case attached onto the cleaning tool as broken pieces. In such a cleaning method, though the above described tiny protrusion on a surface of a magnetic transfer carrier is removed by the cleaning tool, broken pieces from the magnetic film are attached as foreign matter onto the surface of a magnetic transfer carrier by way of the cleaning tool and magnetic transfer is inconveniently performed onto a hard disk, which is a magnetic record medium, with the magnetic transfer carrier having the foreign matter attached thereon.
In a conventional cleaning method, therefore, a necessity came to occur for frequent cleaning a cleaning tool itself, thereby leading to addition of an extra cleaning step, reduction in productivity for hard disks, increase in production cost of disks, further a need for expensive apparatus for cleaning a cleaning tool itself and others with a resultant high cost as a whole.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide a cleaning method capable of performing cleaning of a magnetic transfer carrier at low cost with certainty, without a need for an apparatus dedicated to cleaning of a cleaning tool itself.